Thursday, November 16, 2017

Living DNA results for my brother

Living DNA results came in for my brother. We are the least alike thus far of us seven siblings and fortunately for me he has been willing to be tested here and everywhere (and I have done so!). I expect his results to show a strong southern England setting and good percentages along the eastern coast of England. That was completely fulfilled but I was surprised not to see any Scotland but he does have a Cumbria component which is our Routledge line and they are far removed from the Scottish Highlands having come to the Cumbria area in the 1400s. I also thought he would have a north western European component that would be Germanic rather than Scandinavian. His results follow and I compare them to my results.

 Area                                                       my brother             me

Europe                                                      98.9%                100%

Great Britain and Ireland                         95.9%                   96.5%

South Central England                            23.9%                   31.7%

Southeast England                                  18.8%                      7.2%

Devon                                                      13.4%                     14.6%

Central England                                       0%                          14.6%

North Yorkshire                                     11.6%                         3.5%

South England                                       11.5%                         2.7%

Lincolnshire                                            7.7%                         2%

Northumbria                                             5.5%                         4%

North West England                                  0%                           3.5%

Cumbria                                                  2.2%                           0%

South Yorkshire                                      1.2%                           5.4%

Southwest Scotland and Northern Ireland   0%                        4.8%

Northwest England                                  0%                             3.5%

Aberdeenshire                                         0%                             2.5% 


Europe (North and West)                        3%                              3.5%

Germanic                                                  3%                             0%

Scandinavia                                              0%                             3.5%

 Asia (South)                                         1.1%                            0%

Southern Central Asia                           1.1%                            0%


The first item that pretty much defines our family is the Great Britain and Ireland percentage. My result is 96.5% and my brother's result is 95.9%. Given that our father, three of our grandparents and all of their known ancestors were born and lived in England probably not surprising. Our fourth grandparent - maternal grandfather  John Routledge Pincombe - was born in Canada but his father William Robert Pincombe was born in England (Devon) and his mother Grace Gray was born in Canada and she was our first born Canadian ancestor. However both of her parents (Robert Gray and Elizabeth Mary Ann Routledge) were born in England (father in East Riding of Yorkshire and mother in Cumberland).

The North and West Europe component that each of us have remains somewhat of a mystery. I have 3.5% Scandinavian and my brother has 3% Germanic. Looking at 3% of our DNA the rough estimate would be a 3x great grandparent or 2 4x great grandparents. This is an interesting thought actually. For most of our lines I know the 3x great grandparent's place of birth, who they married and when/where they died. But there are a few exceptions - one is my maternal grandmother's father's grandfather - Christopher Buller. I think he is English but I have no proof. His death registration/burial registration does not give any clues in 1832. I have never found his birth/baptism in London, England where he lived his entire life (actually Bermondsey just south of the Thames in his adulthood). His wife Mary Beard I can trace back a number of generations in the Bermondsey area. The other exception is my maternal grandmother's mother's parents and grandparents. But this line is more likely to be Irish/Scot than Scandinavian or Germanic. We do have a number of matches with people who currently live in Germany and always have and I must have a look to see if my brother actually has more of these matches than I do. In general though these matches are with people having a Jewish ancestry and endogamy is probably playing a part in all of that as I suspect our possible Jewish ancestor converted to Church of England back in the 1400s (first appears in Anglican Church records) or earlier. 

The Devon results for both of us at 13.4% for my brother and 14.6% for me are very reasonable given the matches to our Pincombe lines that we share in common. We have been most fortunate to have half a dozen and more of our Pincombe cousins test ranging from 3rd cousin to 4th cousin. Their testing has enabled the phasing of our grandparents DNA which is progressing and helpful with new matches. Our Pincombe line was at Bishops Nympton from the late 1590s to the present and prior to that the line was at North Molton (East Buckland and Filleigh) back to 1485. Prior to that is not firmly proven although some researchers have placed this family in western Cornwall and others in Herefordshire. They came to North Molton with Lord de la Zouche following the Battle of Bosworth Field in which Lord Zouche was attainted for supporting Richard III.

The South Central England results with 23.9% for my brother and 31.7% for me were also an expected result. South Central England includes Wiltshire and Somerset (as well as Hampshire) and the matches which we have thus far point to my having inherited strongly from my paternal grandmother whose lines were from Wiltshire predominantly although she, herself, was born in Kimpton, Hampshire. Plus I have strong matches with my 2x great grandmother (my maternal side) who was born at Selworthy, Elizabeth Rew (daughter of John Rew and Elizabeth Siderfin) but married her Pincombe husband at Bishops Nympton and my brother does not match the Somerset cousins for the most part. My brother inherited strongly from his paternal grandfather which is primarily Hampshire and perhaps gives some evidence with his South eastern percentage that the Blake families at Andover were indeed all related as one line of this family went to Surrey and then London in the latter part of the 1600s.

Southeast England which includes London and Surrey was the home of my 3x great grandfather Christopher Buller's wife Mary Beard. The Beard family can be found back into the 1600s in the Bermondsey area. Henry Beard (Mary's father) was a tanner and he had married Elizabeth Hemsley and her family is likely from the North Yorkshire/Northumberland area back a couple of generations (Elizabeth was born in 1742 at St Mary Newington daughter of Matthew Hemsley and Mary Coal. But my brother's portion at 18.8% is much larger than would be expected from 4x great grandparents and the only other London line is of course Christopher Buller himself. Hence I am suspicious that Blake is also showing up in this area with its roots in Andover.

No Central England for my brother and again not a surprise as he has very few matches with our Buller and Welch cousins. Henry Christopher Buller married Anne Welch in 1838 at Edgbaston, Warwickshire. He the son of Christopher Buller and Mary Beard and Anne the daughter of William Welch and Sarah Cheatle. In this choice he received more Pincombe-Gray then Buller-Taylor from our mother. William Robert Pincombe having married Grace Gray (family from East Riding of Yorkshire and Cumberland) my maternal great grandparents.

North Yorkshire was 11.6% for my brother and only 3.5% for me. Our Sproxton family likely hailed from North Yorkshire (Ann Sproxton (daughter of Richard Sproxton and Ann Harland married 1753 Great Driffield) married John Cobb 1782 at Lund and they were the parents of Elizabeth Cobb who married Robert Gray 1806 at Lund and their son Robert Junior emigrated to Canada and was the father of Grace Gray. The percentage is high however and I suspect there is also Hemsley in that mix.

South England is primarily Hampshire where our father was born (Ernest Blake born 1904 at Eastleigh) and all of his Blake line mostly from Upper Clatford and all pretty much within a few kilometres of Andover going back in time although Elizabeth Lambden (Elizabeth married Isaac Farmer 1789 at Andover; Ann Farmer married John Blake also at Andover in 1823 (parents of Edward Blake my great grandfather)'s father was likely from Berkshire. For the most part though the Blake line and the families that married into Blake were from Andover or closeby. My brother inherited strongly from my paternal grandfather and that shows up strongly in his matches. He is at 11.5% and I am at 2.7% and I suspect some of mine is from the Dorset area where our great grandmother Maria Jane Knight was born (she married Edward Blake at Upper Clatford in 1870) as I have very good Knight matches.

As with myself, Lincolnshire is partly an unknown. Close to London as I get back into the 1700s there are some unknowns in my lines. My brother was 7.7% and myself at 2%. Certainly he inherited strongly from the Gray family and as I work my way back in the East Riding of Yorkshire there are lines coming in that I have not yet discovered.

Northumbria at 5.5% for my brother and 4% for me is perhaps some of our Routledge ancestry (2 of my 3x great grandparents Thomas Routledge and Elizabeth Routledge (2nd cousins) married in 1785 at Bewcastle Cumberland). There is also my Hemsley family likely from this area and 5x to 6x great grandparents.

Cumbria at 2.2% for my brother and 0% for me is very likely this Routledge family as well. Although I do have matches with our Routledge cousins and my brother does not thus far only two have tested.

South Yorkshire at 1.2% for my brother and 5.4% for me is perhaps again the Gray family who lived at Etton and places within about a 10 kilometre radius of Etton.

Not unexpected, my brother shows no Irish or Scottish. He does not have a lot of matches compared to a multitude of Irish/Scot matches for myself. Northwest England at 0% for my brother and 3.5% for myself, Southwest Scotland and Northern Ireland and 0% for my brother and 4.8% for myself, and Aberdeenshire at 0% for my brother and 2.5% all point to our possible Irish/Planter Scot ancestry. He has very few matches with people of known Irish/Scot ancestry. This is of course our unknown line. My maternal grandmother's mother was Ellen Taylor born at Birmingham and we of course share her mitochondrial DNA (H11a2a1, relatively uncommon although there are probably slightly less than one million people who share it on the planet today!) which does point to Ayrshire/Argyllshire Scotland in the Blood of the Isles Database. Matches with the colony in the Carolinas founded by the Rev William Martin and his six shiploads of colonists in 1772 was from County Antrim and a number of matches with our mitochondrial DNA are found with people who descend from this group of colonists.

Scandinavian (3.5% for myself) and Germanic (3% for my brother) are somewhat mysterious as I do not have any known ancestors born in these two areas. But I have many many Scandinavian matches (and some German). My brother has few Scandinavian but many German matches. Perhaps it is fairly ancient and has just managed to be passed down through the ages relatively intact but through whom is the question and one which I look at in depth with each new close match that is from Scandinavia or the Germanic Countries.

Very pleased with these results as well from Living DNA. Looking forward to their matching. I have also shared one set of another brother's results and one set of another sister's results for the matching. Now that I have these results I will do a write up for Living DNA as they have requested feedback.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Remembrance Day

Reflecting on what has been done for us in the past century by the men and women of our armed forces, I found myself thinking once again about the idea of a guaranteed income for every man and woman 18 years of age and older. Although conservative by nature, and fiscally conservative at that, I totally support the idea of a guaranteed income for every man and woman 18 years of age and older in the entire world.

How would such an expense be funded? For me that is the first question uppermost in my mind. The recent release of information on wealth being concealed in off shore accounts reminds me once again that we need to have a world income tax; if you do not pay tax in the jurisdiction in which you live which accounts for all the income that you have earned (and that rate needs to be a reasonable one) then you should pay tax to a world wide income tax institution. Where would such an institution be located? Well properly it belongs within the United Nations. The organization had such wondrous hopes when it was founded - world wide peace was the aim but also it was to protect the minorities of the world who had no other protection. Can we trust that the United Nations could be a tax collector and distribute the monies in a fair and equitable manner? In the long run, I think we could. This meeting place of all the nations of the world has one vote each but perhaps we should reconsider that idea and convert that to representation by population. That way all of the people within a country become much more valuable to each country. But along with that we would have to consider population limitations namely following the Chinese example of controlling family size choosing perhaps two children rather than one since that is neutral growth - two people producing two children.

Looking at my own country Canada, why would the distribution of money in this fashion be valuable to people who would be supporting this funding from their rather large income base? Because they need people to buy their products, the more money they remove from their own country's jurisdiction and fail to pay income tax on it to their home country, the poorer the people in their home country become because somebody has to pay the taxes that run a country. At the moment we are heading towards more and more low income families and certainly $18,000 per person is well below the poverty level here in Canada. But two individuals make a couple and both over 18 they would then have $36,000 just for existing. With such a base they could do advanced training because you need that to get anywhere in this world of artificial intelligence. With such a base they are not living wondering where they will get funds to pay their rent/mortgage, food. They are spending the money locally supporting all those industries/services nearby.

With such a distribution of money in Canada, we would eliminate Welfare, Old Age Pensions and Disability all at once. The savings for the business of generating these particular items would be considerable although we would then need a department that manages the guaranteed income.

The dream would be that everyone in the world would be eligible and if no country provides then application to the United Nations department would guarantee that all would be covered.Controlling abuse would be simple, DNA testing of each and every individual on the face of this earth.

Friday, November 3, 2017

New Directions

Life has turned around a new corner for me and I am sitting back and looking at the workload that I have assigned to myself. I want to do it a little differently to match my lifestyle.

Firstly, I want to continue blogging Blake wills and will try to get back to that at least 10 wills per month (I am a person who lives by numbers, I learn numerically and I live numerically - just me).

Secondly, I want to fix up an error that I have recently discovered in my Legacy charting. When I upgraded to Legacy 8 from Legacy 7 I seemed to have shifted the way that I opened and saved my files resulting in a set of duplicate files which contained changes somewhat erratically. Recently discovered after my busy year as co-treasurer of the OGS Conference 2017 (and there is still work to do; not yet finished as a final trial balance needs to be done and then the audit).

Thirdly, along with fixing that error I want to produce a new family chart to use with my DNA matching on the various services that I have tested at (along with my siblings). I am finding it very handy to have all this information and matching but it would be even more meaningful if my charting was consistent and so that is another one of my goals from this new direction.

Fourthly, I want to continue with my one name studies of Blake and Pincombe but I am in the process of teasing some of this information out of my personal records as over the past fourteen years of doing genealogy (yes amazingly I have now been at this for fourteen years!) so that I am able to hand off, at some point in the future, all of my records to the Guild in the form of DVDs to either be picked up by another as a one name study or into their archives for a future researcher who will do the same as I did - pick up the traces of work that someone else has done in the past.

Fifthly, I will continue writing my family story. I have "completed" the story of my generation, my parent's generation (although family get togethers continue to add new information to their stories), my grandparent's generation (new records add to this information and family get togethers) and my great grandparents including all of their children tracing them down as close to the present as I am able (a few exciting matches have lately come my way continuing to prove that the paper research that I have done is right on). Susan Courage, and I hope she doesn't mind my mentioning her name, has emerged as one of my 6th cousins 2x removed where we share 5x great grandparents Ellis Ellis and Sarah Wellspring (our family DNA match is with her sister but none the less very exciting to have found a cousin amongst the people that I have actually come to know). But now I am into my 2x great grandparents and continue to work on John Blake and Ann Farmer and their ten children, 49 grandchildren and hundreds of great grandchildren I am still pulling out of the records. I have been nearly a year working on this line!

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

H11 Newsletter, Volume 1, Issue 4, 2017

H11 Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 4, 2017

Table of Contents
1. FT DNA Project
2. Value of doing mtDNA
3. Path ahead

1. FT DNA Project and Project Statistics:
There are now 254 members in our H11 project. Full sequence results are completed on 224 members of the group. Interestingly 174 members of this group have also done Family Finder. Thus far 217 members have provided maternal ancestor information. Eighteen members have not permitted access to their full results resulting in their being placed in a folder “results are private.” In some cases even when the results are listed as private members could have been assigned to their subclade if it is a terminal subgroup.

2. Value of doing mtDNA
Generally when speakers discuss DNA they tend to place mtDNA last in terms of value. Most tend to stress the value in doing yDNA and Family Finder. YDNA certainly if you are looking at your surname male line name especially if you are brickwalled. Family Finder is quite rapidly coming into its own as the most valuable of all the DNA testing. However, my own experience with mtDNA has been handy in my research. My great grandmother (maternal line i.e. my mother's mother's mother) is a relative unknown. Her name, Ellen Taylor, has been known to me since childhood. Her place of birth according to the census is Birmingham England. Her marriage has not yet been located and that would yield the forename of her father. Her husband as known to me was Edwin Denner Buller and indeed on all of the birth registrations of Edwin's and Ellen's children they are recorded as Edwin Buller and Ellen Buller formerly Taylor. But who was Ellen Taylor. Purchasing all of the relevant birth registrations for Ellen Taylor in Birmingham has yielded one likely candidate daughter of Thomas Taylor and Ellen Roberts. But is it she? Her death registration has her age as 37 years (my grandmother said her mother was 37 when she passed away from pneumonia (my grandmother was eleven years of age) in 1897). That was my starting point and I bought all birth registrations, as mentioned, within two years of that date.

When I first tested my DNA at National Genographic in 2006 I had discovered that I was H11. Transferring my results into FT DNA and further testing revealed first of all that I had almost no matches (2 only HVRI and HVRII) although that has grown through the years to 18 one step away (Full Genetic Scan) and one match (my brother). Another discovery back in 2007 was the Blood of the Isles Database which yielded two matches at the HVRI and HVRII level (this database does not have full genetic scan results). These two matches were located in Ayrshire, Scotland.

As autosomal testing developed (Family Finder at FT DNA, DNA relatives at 23 and Me, AncestryDNA), my countries of origin slowly developed over these three companies but especially with my testing at Living DNA. Emerging from all of this testing was Northern Irish/Southern Scottish ancestry. Hence my H11 result was pointing to an ancestry unknown to me and I do know all of my lines back to my 3x great grandparents (and further) except for my strictly maternal line.

Family lore also came to mind as I recalled my mother talking about a possible Irish ancestry or Scot. Scot would not be surprising as my Routledge lines are definitely Scot but Irish I do not (and still do not have) any proven lines there but my mtDNA is pointing the way and over time I may yet discover this line hidden to me. I am a great believer in doing your full genetic scan for your mitochondrial DNA.

3. Path Ahead
An in depth look at the results of the H11 haplogroup study will occur in either the first or the second issue of volume 2 of the H11 Newsletter. I  have not yet heard any rumours of an update to the Phylo Tree but such an update would be most welcomed.

Any submissions to this newsletter can be submitted to Elizabeth Kipp (kippeeb@rogers.com).